Please list some of the vietnamese scientists and their accomplistments that you know of so that younger vietnamese can have role models to look up to. I'll start first.



Tue Nguyen has an extensive background in several technical interdisciplinary areas. He has nearly 15 years of experience in advanced semiconductor device processes at IBM, Sharp, and Simplus, a copper/barrier semiconductor equipment start-up he founded. He has published dozens of papers in technical journals or conference proceedings and has over 40 U.S. patents issued with several others pending. Tue was honored at the White House and featured in both television shows and several newspapers articles including the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle for his academic achievements. He earned 7 technical degrees from MIT in a record time of 7 years. His degrees include BSs in Physics, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Nuclear Engineering plus an MS and PhD in Nuclear Engineering. Tue is also a patent agent able to assist young companies in identifying their competitive technologies while validating advantages that generate credible and cost effective patent portfolios.

And

Sixteen-year-old Dien Le's future — if he had one at all - looked bleak. It was April 1975 and Le and his family were trapped in Saigon. Le, son of a South Vietnamese Army officer who worked with U.S. Army advisors, feared for his life and the lives of his family. Today, Le, now known as Jonathan Lee, is recognized by NASA for inventing a new alloy — a new high-strength aluminum-silicon alloy developed at the Marshall Center which promises to lower engine emissions and could improve gas mileage in cars, boats and recreational vehicles.
Photo: Lee (NASA/MSFC)

Sixteen-year-old Dien Le’s future — if he had one at all — looked bleak.
It was April 1975 and Le and his family were trapped in Saigon. As the last of the United States military was pulling out, North Vietnamese troops — more than 150,000 of them — had encircled the city. A city left with a mere 60,000 South Vietnamese soldiers to defend it. It was the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War.
Le, son of a South Vietnamese Army officer who worked with U.S. Army advisors, feared for his life and the lives of his family.
Today, Le, now known as Jonathan Lee, is a U.S. citizen and structural materials engineer with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. He has a family — a wife and three daughters — and a very bright future as co-inventor of a new alloy that could improve gas mileage in cars, boats and recreational vehicles, all while reducing engine emission.
NASA recently recognized Lee for inventing the new alloy by sharing a percentage of the royalties with him.
But on that April day in 1975, with tens of thousands of Vietnamese clamoring to get out of Saigon, Lee was not sure if he or his family would live — let alone ever see America.
Amid the gathering chaos, Lee’s father, a lieutenant colonel in the South Vietnamese army and a recipient of the U.S. Army Commendation Medal, arrived home mid-day, unexpected. He assembled his family, telling them they must leave their life-long home, taking nothing with them.
The family did just that. No clothes. No mementos. Just Lee, his father, mother, grandmother and brother.
Good fortune enabled the entire Lee family — while many Vietnamese families were split — to board a plane for Guam and California.
Fate brought Lee and his family to Huntsville, Ala.
While awaiting relocation to New Jersey from a refugee center at Camp Pendleton, Calif., Lee’s father received an unexpected telephone call from a U.S. Army buddy, former Maj. Tom Dark of Huntsville. Dark told him he had been searching refugee camps for the Lees, and wanted the family to move to Huntsville. He arranged for Grace Lutheran Church to co-sponsor the family.
Lee’s family came to Huntsville, and started their lives over.
His father took a job with GTE Telephone Co., and returned to school to earn an industrial engineering degree. His mother took a job with the J.C. Penney Co.
In 1981, each member of the Lee family became a U.S. citizen and adopted “American” names. Lee chose Jonathan, remembering that a friend had compared Lee to the title character in the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull, known for his strength and determination.
“Sometimes I can’t believe how fortunate I am – to live here in America and to work for NASA,” says Lee.
As a teenager, Lee remembers watching Neil Armstrong take his first step on the Moon, broadcast on South Vietnamese television by U.S. Armed Forces Radio and Television Services. “ “I knew then I wanted to work for NASA,” says Lee. ”But I couldn’t imagine that my family would leave Vietnam as political refugees and end up in Huntsville, home to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.”
Lee began earnestly pursuing his interest in science and space in 1979 as a student at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). Under the sponsorship of UAH and the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Lee conceived and built an apparatus to hold a polymer superconductor crystal growth experiment.
His experiment, which flew on a 1984 Space Shuttle mission, formed the basis of his master’s thesis and thrust him into a career as a systems analyst.
Lee began his science career with BDM Corporation in Huntsville. And in1989, his dream came true. Lee joined NASA’s Marshall Center as a materials engineer and began work on his first project: developing advanced lightweight, high-strength metal composites for use on the International Space Station and advanced propulsion systems.
Today, Lee is both a solid-state physicist and an engineer at the Marshall Center — a mixture of two fields that allows him to understand the intricacies of how materials behave on an atomic level, and the technical aspects of how materials work together.
He’s working on the continued development of two new aluminum-silicon alloys — called MSFC-398 and MSFC-388 — that promise to improve gas mileage in cars, boats, and recreational vehicles, while at the same time lowering engine emissions.
The new alloys are stronger than most cast aluminum-silicon alloys now used in automobile manufacturing. When tested at 600 degrees Fahrenheit, the alloys are three-to-four-times stronger than conventional cast aluminum alloys. And the new alloys can be produced at a projected cost of less than $1 per pound — a cost incentive attractive to manufacturers.
The alloys are ideal for high-temperature cast components used in engines — from cars and planes to ski jets and lawnmowers. Originally developed in conjunction with a major automobile manufacturer, the alloys have been licensed to three industries that research and manufacture high performance aluminum alloys and metal composites. NASA also holds two U.S. patents and has 25 international patents pending on the new aluminum alloys.
“NASA High-Strength Alloy,” says Lee, —“offers greater wear resistance and surface hardness, which enables manufacturers to use less material, reducing the part’s weight and cost and improving gas mileage, engine performance and engine durability.”
Lee also has developed a theory on how hydrogen reacts with metals. Because NASA uses hydrogen as a rocket fuel, Hydrogen Environment Embrittlement, a condition that causes cracking in metals exposed to gaseous hydrogen, poses a threat to its launch vehicles, including the Space Shuttle. By studying this condition, Lee has developed a simple analytical tool that could be used to predict the embrittlement behavior and develop new materials that avoid the damaging effects of hydrogen. This research could impact NASA – making possible the development of hydrogen resistant propulsion hardware – and society, as well –transportation and consumption hydrogen gas as an alternative clean-energy source.
“When I was 10, watching astronauts climb into the space capsules on TV, I never imagined that something this wonderful could happen to me,” says Lee.
“I know the people in America appreciate the importance of their freedom. I know my family and I certainly do.”

where's duong nguyet anh??? the bomb lady

Well that's why I asked people to list the scientists of vietnamese descent that they know of. I'm only one person, I can't possibly know every vietnamese scientist.

Yeah props to Duong Nguyet Anh, she words for NASA in designing the cave bombs for the recent war America was in. She was only given several weeks to come up with the weapon. I'll try to find more... Good topic by the way!

How about Tu Nguyen?

He beats out 100,000 contestants and 2 Indian IT teams (2nd and 3rd place finish) to win this Microsoft competition all by himself.
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Imagine Cup Gears Up for 2004

Microsoft's Jeff Raikes Presents 2003 Winner Tu Nguyen With $25,000 Check; Competition Expands 2004 Contest to Blend Technology and Art in 2004

REDMOND, Wash. -- Nov. 14, 2003 -- In a ceremony today at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Jeff Raikes, group vice president of Productivity and Business Services at Microsoft Corp., presented Tu Nguyen with a $25,000 check to honor his victory in the 2003 Imagine Cup programming competition. Inspired while working in his parents' Vietnamese restaurant in Omaha, Nguyen developed an application designed to bridge the language gap between English-speaking waiters and Vietnamese-speaking chefs. Simultaneously, Microsoft announced that it will expand the 2004 Imagine Cup from one category to four invitationals designed to highlight a blend of technology and art.

"It is inspiring to witness the unique and inventive ways young people apply technology to their everyday lives," Raikes said. "Tu's innovative work is but one great example, and we are pleased to acknowledge him today."

Nguyen was one of two U.S. winners who advanced to the world championships in the 2003 Imagine Cup, where he ultimately took first prize. He designed a Point of Delivery Systems (iPODS) solution that runs on Pocket PC devices, enabling the restaurant's staff to communicate more effectively by translating food orders into each person's native language. Waiters enter orders into devices that transmit data to a local server. The data is then translated from English into the chef's native language and sent to a printer in the restaurant's kitchen. By automating the ordering process, the application eliminates the dual-entry process and inconsistency of paper tickets, saving the staff time and the restaurant money.

Here's another one. His name is Ha Minh Duy and he is one of the finalists for the Nobel Prize for the Young (don't know the actual title). Here's the link, it's in Vietnamese though.

http://web.tintucvietnam.com/Nhip-Song-Tre...04/1/33455.ttvn

Here's another prominent vietnamese scientist.

Dr. TRAN THONG is the Vice-President of Systems Design and Development, Micro Systems Engineering, Inc. (MSEI), a Biotronik company in Lake Oswego, Oregon, USA. Biotronik GmbH, Berlin, Germany, is a leading manufacturer of cardiac pacemakers and other cardiovascular instruments. Prior to joining MSEI in 1993, he held a number of technical and management positions at Tektronix Federal Systems, Inc., Beaverton, Oregon. These included Vice-President of Research and Engineering and General Manager of the Digital Signal Processing Business unit; Director of the Electronics Laboratory, Tektronix Laboratories. He also worked at General Electric Company, Litton Industries, AT&T Bell Laboratories. Dr. Thong received his BSEE degree, with distinction, from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Illinois, his MSE, MA and PhD degrees, all in Electrical Engineering, from Princeton University. Dr. Thong holds 11 U.S. patents and has published over 40 technical papers. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He was the General Chair of the 1989 IEEE Symposium on Circuits and Systems, the Executive Vice-President of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (1989-1990), associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems. He was a founding member of VACETS, its first Chairman (1994-95) and the past-President (1995-96) of VACETS. He served as a member of VACETS Board of Director from 1994 to 1996. Currently, he is an advisor to VACETS. He has held faculty appointments at a number of universities. He is currently on the Board of Advisors of the Zentralinstitut fuer biomedizinische Technik, University of Erlangen, Erlangen, Germany.

Amazing, thank you for sharing KevinBui. So under this topic, I guess social science doesn't count?

Here are a few more:

Phiet T. Bui, PhD
Co-Founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Bui holds a Ph.D. from Purdue University and was previously an independent pharmaceutical/biotechnology industry consultant based in Irvine, California. An early employee at Amgen, Dr. Bui was responsible for coordinating the facility scale-up activities before becoming the Director of Process Engineering at Xoma Corporation. Following that, as a consultant, he served several internationally recognized corporations including SmithKline, Dow Chemical, Celtrix Pharmaceuticals Inc., Jacobs Engineering, Ingene, Ehrlich Rominger Engineering, Occidental Petroleum and Clark Richardson Biskup Engineering. Dr. Bui has been responsible for designing many large scale processes and biotech manufacturing facilites in North America; his experience with the aforementioned companies includes the design of facilities for fungal and microbial fermentation, mammalian cell culture, fluid bed fermentation, protein purification, and bacterial and viral vaccines. These experiences have given Dr. Bui valuable knowledge about what is required to take a product all the way from discovery to large scale production.

Dr. Chi D. Pham is CEO of Potomac Investments and Research Associates. He was visiting professor of economics and finance at the Kogod School of Business at American University and a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He also has been an instructor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania and IMF resident representative in Togo and Laos. He has lectured extensively in North America, Asia and Africa. Dr. Pham received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. from Laval University. He recently co-edited two books, The Vietnamese Economy: Awakening the Dormant Dragon (2003) and The Challenges of Integration (2002). Dr. Pham has also edited two books on the Lao economy and published a number of IMF country studies and research papers, as well as a memoir and several short essays in Vietnamese.

Dr. Loi Nguyen
Founder, Vice President of Technology
Inphi Corporation
Dr. Loi Nguyen has over 14 years of experience in the development of high-speed devices and integrated circuits based on advanced GaAs and InP technologies. He is well recognized in the high-speed III-V research community worldwide for his work in this field.
From 1984 to 1988, Dr. Nguyen worked at the Honeywell Physical Sciences Center in Bloomington, Minnesota while writing his graduate thesis on the development of GaAs devices, which contributed to the commercialization of advanced GaAs technology for applications such as direct broadcast satellite (DBS), millimeter wave radios, automotive radars, and defense. In 1992 he established a world-record cutoff frequency for high-speed transistors, for which he received the prestigious IEEE Paul Rappaport Award for Best Paper published in an Electron Devices Society journal.
Dr. Nguyen holds seven U.S. patents and is an author of more than 50 scientific publications. He has served on technical committees of the IEEE International Electron Devices Meetings, the IEEE Device Research Conference, and the IEEE International Solid State Devices Meetings. Dr. Nguyen holds a B.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Cornell and an M.B.A. from the Anderson School at UCLA.


Dr. Viet Vu is head of the research group on national accounts methodology with the United Nations Statistics Division. Before he was a senior statistician at the United Nations, where he served as a consultant on national accounts statistics to various counties in Asia. He has been a technical advisor on UNDP-supported national accounts projects for Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia, was an economist at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and was a research scientist at New York University's Institute for Economic Analysis. Dr. Vu received a Ph.D. from New York University and a B.A. from California State University. His publications include National Accounts: A Practical Introduction (forthcoming), Economy of Vietnam in Reform 1990-2000 (2002), and Handbook on Links between Business Accounting and National Accounting (2000).

Journeys in Elegance
By Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson
Photos by Mark Lee



The tiny fishing boat was built to traverse the rivers of Vietnam or follow the shoreline of the South China Sea. But this night, more than 120 people on board were trying to cross open waters--avoiding pirates, Vietnamese authorities, and the gods of mishap--to make it nearly 400 miles to Indonesia's islands.

Trac D. Tran was 17 years old. His brother, Tri, was 11. The year was 1986, and the boys were fleeing a failing country in the waning years of what was known as the Vietnamese boat people crisis.

There was so little room in the overburdened boat that Trac Tran sat with his feet hanging over the side. He felt the water up to his knees.

Simple and elegant. In a perfect universe, numbers should be nice, not ugly. Pi, for example, is an ugly sort of number: 3.1415926535897931 into infinity. Long numbers of its ilk create time-consuming hassles in the world of computing. Today, in Trac Tran's staked-out corner of that world, he pursues a finer sense of logic.

The year is 2000. In classroom 117 of Homewood's Barton Hall, Tran, now a Hopkins assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, paces across brown speckled linoleum. He tells his graduate students to avoid sloppy fixes.

Tran's students, many from eastern or southern Asia, are studying digital signal processing--a field integral to the electronic freeway of the future, wireless data transmission. Tran himself has invented a new way to condense multimedia data faster, cheaper, and with less hunger for battery power. Such advances will bring video, audio and images to hand-held Internet-linked devices. He has applied for a U.S. patent. He is 30 years old.

Wearing a white Oxford shirt and khaki slacks one Friday in class, the young professor goes over a tough homework problem, taking the opportunity to tap one of his favorite themes in engineering, and in life:

"I realize that the homework assignment was quite ambiguous, that I should have seen the problem coming and warned you in advance," he said, as he handed back papers to stone-faced students. "But I can also argue the other way around, that you're graduate students and that you know how to make the right assumptions.

"A wrong assumption gives you a wrong answer," he explains later. "If you improvise a solution with a little trick, all you did was discover something trivial. You have achieved triviality instead of finding something significant, something that can open a new research path."

Paths. Sometimes Tran wonders how he got from there to here, from a village in postwar South Vietnam, to a high school in San Jose, California, to his 12-by-12 office in Barton Hall.

"I should tell you, I'm an atheist. Not in the bad sense, but I don't pray for things," Tran says. "Whatever I want, I just go out and get it. But sometimes I say it's probably not me. There must be something or someone that is making this happen. The pieces of the puzzle are fitting together so nicely."

Perhaps the pivotal piece was a theorem he discovered in the 5th grade.

As a student in a Vietnamese public school, Tran listened one day as his math teacher explained properties of multiplication. When you square numbers that end in five, the teacher said, you'll have 25 as the last two digits. "I wondered what made that true generally," Tran remembers. "I thought, 'Does it apply to anything else?'"

So he started figuring and discovered something similar with two numbers whose final digits added up to 10 and whose remaining digits are the same--say when you multiply 76 and 74. Through a simple formula, one could take a shortcut and know the answer within seconds, in this case, 5624. (If you are interested in trying out the math, you add 1 to the first digit, and multiply that by the same number [7] to get 56; you'd then multiply the last two digits to get 24.)

A brilliant boy, but not yet a researcher. "I wasn't trained that if you discover something, you want to search hard to see if you were the first," he says. "I didn't even bother to search. I kind of thought maybe I had invented something great. About two years later, I saw the problem in a math book. It had been discovered maybe centuries before."

He would later tell the story in his application letter to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"It was a nice little thing to look for. Simple but elegant," he says, noting that even to himself it seemed symbolic. "I want to know why things behave the way they do." Researchers, after all, need to be curious. The successful ones, ambitious.




"A bottle of medicine for seasickness, a first-aid kit, lemons, and sugar. That's what Trac Tran carried in a small nylon bag when he fled his native country for a new one. The trip by water would take seven days and nights."
Tran grew up in a cramped, concrete-block house in the small Vietnamese town of Baria, about 65 miles from Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. He shared an attic room with his little brother; they played in a front yard just a few feet across. For a while, the parameters seemed big enough.
But his parents saw their sons' world with an adult's perspective of time and space. His mother taught Vietnamese literature and kept college-level books around the house, including Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn translated into Vietnamese. "I gobbled the books up," Tran says. His father was a high school English teacher with a penchant for American history and geography, despite the war.

His father, Tram Van Tran, and mother, Phuong Phi Nguyen, understood the limits of their world. When the communists won South Vietnam 25 years ago this spring, a few years after American soldiers went home, local authorities ordered Trac's father to stop teaching English. Trac was six years old.

"We were told that English was a capitalist language, not a good language for communists," says Tram Tran, now 57. The government urged the study of Russian instead. "In reality, Russian is a language you can only speak to the Russians. If you know only English, you can go everywhere and use it." Within months, Tran was investigated "to see if I had anything to do with capitalism," he recalls. He was later allowed to teach, partly because the demand for English was simply too great.

Like many other Vietnamese at the time, the family faced scarce economic opportunities. Trac's mother earned only the equivalent of $40 a month teaching high school literature. His father says he did extra work, sometimes translating, sometimes interpreting "to get here and there a penny to make ends meet."

So they looked to their sons' likely futures. They taught them English, they taught them literature, they urged them never to be afraid to tackle the things most young people know little about. "We are his parents, we are his teachers," says his mother, now 52, who is mastering English. The parents valued the ideal of balance. Their children studied math, poetry, and art.

Early on, Tran's parents gained bragging rights. "Trac was good in scientific subjects. He was good in the humanities. Almost every subject, he was good at and in every subject he always ran first in his class or school. For 11 years in Vietnam he never ran second," his father says. "But even if he worked hard, he couldn't go far. Colleges in Vietnam are very backward. With his abilities, it was better for him to go abroad. Then, the only way to go abroad was to flee the country."

Sitting in their son's concrete-block office on the Homewood campus in early spring, Tram Tran and Phuong Nguyen tell their family's story. She is wearing a black and white print dress, he a professorial tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. Trac's father has brought a new Canon EOS to snap a photo of his wife and son standing next to me. The older couple arrived in the United States just two months before.

The two talk about the night in 1986 when the family tried to leave Vietnam in a boat about as wide as their son's office and three times as long. Advised to separate from their children to avoid detection and prosecution by police, the parents--who already had launched several failed attempts to escape the country as a family--arrived at the prescribed rendezvous point after their sons did.

On that night, 70 people were supposed be aboard. Each family had paid the equivalent of $1,000 a head to smugglers, money they had saved from better days, gathered from relatives, and converted into gold bullion or jewelry. But chaos was the rule, and more people found out about the secret trip. Scrambling over the side of the boat, newcomers filled it before the Tran brothers' parents arrived. The boat captain, scared, took off.

Several days before, Trac's mother had taken the boys to a safe house by the ocean where the boys would wait with strangers. Trip organizers "would make extra arrangements for children because it is hard for them to keep a secret," Trac Tran says. "Children talk a lot, they run a lot, they make a lot of noise and typically they tell the truth. So they wanted control over the smart children."

His mother understood the risk of separation. The night they parted, there seemed little to say, Tran remembers: "She told me, 'Study hard in America.'"

"We were apart for almost 15 years," says Trac's mother, her eyes filling up. "I teared when I thought about him." "She cried," says her husband.

A bottle of medicine for seasickness, a first-aid kit, lemons, and sugar.

That's what Trac Tran carried in a small nylon bag when he left his native country for a new one. The trip by water would take seven days and seven nights. With his 11-year-old brother beside him, he tried not to think about being thirsty.

"There was water in the boat, but everybody just had one inch of water a day," he says today, holding his fingers about an inch apart on a cup of cappuccino at a cafe near campus. "All I remember is wanting water, water, I would have traded anything for a sip. But everyone wanted the same thing, so everyone saved their water." His mother had given the boys lemons and sugar to ease their thirst.

As the motor propelled the wooden boat further away from home, Tran was afraid. He had no visions of VCRs or MTV in his head. He was angry, young, and not yet a man. An 11th-grader, he was in the midst of studying for his semester exams: "In my mind, I remembered one constant question. Why do I have to leave my family and friends? I thought, this is so ridiculous. I have my own country. Why do I have to go someplace that I have no knowledge of?

"I've always been a logical person. I had tremendous problems with this," he remembers. "I want to plan ahead. I didn't know my strategy. I didn't know what to expect."

There were the pint-sized milk cartons he would encounter on the biggest plane he had ever been on; he needed to look around the rows to figure out how the other passengers opened them. His first vision of the United States: the lights of Seattle at night. "I thought, 'Wow, how can there be so many lights?'"

After having landed at a refugee camp on Galang, an island in Indonesia, Trac and Tri Tran learned that their uncle and aunt in San Jose would sponsor them. At the time, Vietnamese refugees were being granted political asylum in the United States.

His parents heard all the news piecemeal. An entire month had passed before trip organizers got word to them that their sons arrived safely at the camp. His mother had slept little. She cried again, this time in relief, when she learned that her sons would be able to live with her eldest brother and his wife.

After leaving home, Trac Tran wasn't able to visit Vietnam until 1997; for a long time it was illegal in that nation for such refugees to return. The parents exchanged letters with their sons, with Trac one every few weeks. His family had no phone. In Vietnam, they still operated under a different set of parameters than those found in America's technological era at the end of the 20th century. As Tran says, "I didn't have the luxury of asking my parents what to do with my career."

So he asked his calculus teacher.

A junior at Andrew Hill High School in San Jose, Tran had decided to focus on math. He says his English wasn't perfect, though he quickly picked up California speak: "It's better to do something you do well, rather than something you suck at."

He started to look around at American colleges. He was anxious because moving to the States had cost him a year in school. It was 1988. "I asked my calculus teacher, 'If you could go to any college, which would you pick?' He said MIT. I was really innocent, I thought, 'Oh, then let's try MIT. Okay.'"

Tran applied. He scored well on the college entrance exams--much better in math, where he missed only one question, than verbal. (He remembers his combined SAT score at 1280 out of 1600). But he was competing against students with higher total scores. He thinks his application essay may have helped: "I guess they read these things and see your enthusiasm." Finding out he'd been accepted, "was the nicest day of my life," he pauses, "careerwise."

Tran had liked San Jose; he had a good group of Vietnamese friends there. To his mind, he didn't encounter much prejudice from Americans whose war in his country remained a painful memory. "Someone driving by would yell, 'Go back to your homeland!'" he says. "That is expected. A minor incident."

At MIT, he truly found his career path--through a bit of chance, ambition, and strategy. The technological world was broadening the real one. To him, the answer to his future seemed artfully simple. And he made the right assumption. "When I got to MIT, everybody was studying computer science and electrical engineering. Again I decided to go with the flow," he says. "I thought communication and information theory would be the best way to go in the future. Society values information--at people's fingertips, anytime, anyplace."

Nonetheless, it was a bold assertion. The nation's foremost technology institute was the first place where Tran had even touched a computer. "I typed up my application letter on a typewriter," he says. His uncle, Phuoc Nguyen, and aunt, Song Ha Nguyen, worked hard--he as a technician for an engineering firm and she as a data entry clerk. Yet for many in the 1980s, a computer was a luxury. "We didn't have these fancy things," Tran says.

Then, everything started moving at cable modem speed. When Tran got to MIT, he sent his first e-mail to a friend on campus. "We put TEST in the subject area and TEST in the body," he says. "I thought, 'This is so revolutionary. This will actually one day eliminate post offices.' I could communicate with my aunt and my uncle and my parents back home." It was 1989. By 1994, he had earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at MIT in electrical engineering and computer science. Four years later, he earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in electrical engineering.

While at Madison, Tran also started working with interactive Internet images in his free time, creating a Vietnamese literature, art, and history web page during the early years of the Internet boom. The page ( http://vhvn.com/) serves as an online electronic library, featuring Vietnamese poetry, short stories, song lyrics, sheet music, audio links, paintings, historical text, and artist biographies he wrote himself. It began as a tribute to his home country and a salve for loneliness. And he did it the hard way, writing raw HTML codes. "There was no Microsoft Front Page program," he says. The website relieved some of his PhD blues. By the time he was almost 30, studying in the United States had taken up nearly half his life. There were other things to think about. At Madison, in the small group of Vietnamese students, he met his future wife, Lan Kim Nguyen, who had also escaped the country on a boat.



Together again: Tran at home with wife Lan Kim Nguyen and his parents.

His parents, who worried that he was eating instant noodles at school, followed his progress by letter, and later by phone. In 1997, he brought a computer to Ho Chi Minh City, where his parents then lived, on his first visit home. He got them hooked up to e-mail. They would appreciate that he had grown into a man of balance. "If you are good at one thing only," his father noted, "when you are tired of it, you have nothing to do to entertain yourself. Trac told me that when he was tired of something he could read books that are totally different."

Trac Tran's Vietnamese-language web page has been visited by nearly 145,000 users. A favorite feature is the famous 3,254-line epic Vietnamese poem, Kieu, by Du Nguyen (1765-1820). It is Vietnam's equivalent of Homer's Odyssey, and on Tran's page admirers can use a search engine to find a particular phrase. With a friend, Tran also has drawn an Asian dragon; he plans to make sections of its multicolored body an encyclopedia-style link to eras in Vietnam's 4,000-year history.

In contrast, the title of his PhD dissertation: "Linear Phase Perfect Reconstruction Filter Bank: Theory, Structure, Design, and Application in Image Compression."

In reality, maybe the two worlds aren't so different: "Math, the way I think about it, is beautiful," he says. "From different angles, it can be art, it can be mathematics. As long as you get the right angle, you can see it.

"Poetry is compact, yet it has multiple levels and viewpoints," he explains further. "You read a poem and someone else reads a poem and they interpret it differently. The compactness of poetry makes this possible. I like things that are compact, something that reveals itself if you look at it from multiple viewpoints." An elegant sort of balance. An evident style. Before he even completed his final classes at the University of Wisconsin, Tran got a job offer to teach at Hopkins.




From different angles, math can be art, it can be mathematics, says Tran. I like things that are compact, something that reveals itself if you look at it from multiple viewpoints.
It was 1998. Tran already was being wooed by the corporate world, fielding high salary offers from Hewlett-Packard Co. and Xerox Corp. (He had already done internships at Xerox, AT&T Bell Labs, and other firms). Yet he carried his parents' love of the educational universe. When Hopkins called, he flew to Baltimore for a full day of interviews. A few days after he returned to Madison, he received several e-mails from Hopkins faculty impressed by his work and his outlook on life.

To find out more about Trac Tran's pathbreaking work in transforming the transmission of digital data, see "Playing the 'Standard' Game."

They could see that Tran knew what kind of grants to pursue, what he hoped to accomplish through teaching, how long it might take for him to become senior enough in his field to make a real mark, and the practical demands and limits of the computer science research he is pursuing. His unique compression method breaks with the norm--a "transform" that uses integers (nice numbers) to create faster data compression (see Playing the "Standard" Game). Tran recognizes that his idea must compete with industry standards already being established. But, in the overall scheme of things, he's ahead.
"We felt that the work he had already done was of a high caliber," says Jerry L. Prince, Hopkins professor of electrical and computer engineering. "When he came here to interview, he gave an excellent talk. He was--I hate to use the word--but mature is the thing. He knew what he wanted to do, and what he wanted to do were the right things. He had a well-balanced perspective."

Tran's parents now live with him in a new home he bought with his wife in Laurel, Maryland. The four-bedroom house (there's so much room, he says, he's not sure what to do with the fourth bedroom) is about halfway between the Homewood campus and northern Virginia. He has taken his parents to Seven Corners, where a precommunist era South Vietnamese flag flies over Eden Center, one of many business areas that cater to the large Vietnamese community there.

His little brother, Tri, 25, is now an electrical engineer in San Jose. As it ended up, they both attended MIT, their times overlapping by two years as they pursued degrees.

The world is at the same time bigger and smaller than it was when Trac Tran was 17 years old, his pants legs trailing the surface of the South China Sea. When he studied hard in America, he ended up joining a revolution of young scientists searching for a better way to compress and send the huge amounts of video images and other data being transmitted today--from computer to computer, laptop to laptop, and, if all goes right, cellular telephones to PalmPilots, to computer chips embedded in cuff links or sports watches around the globe.

His mother sighs as she looks back from there to here. From lonely days in Vietnam--when she quit her job to concentrate on the letters she wrote to her two sons--to a chilly day spent standing under cherry blossom trees in Washington, D.C., on a field trip with Trac. Some may ask why, so many years later, she and her husband decided to move here, too. To her, the answer is beautifully simple. "I like the famous country where my children are working

Here's another outstanding vietnamese in science.

2004 Outstanding Male Undergraduate Award

Thuc Vu is in his third year of studies at Carnegie Mellon University. He will receive his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science in May 2004.

Thuc has done significant research in artificial intelligence, contributing to two major projects. In one project, he developed a novel set of techniques that enable a designer of a multi-agent system to specify team behaviors for autonomous agents. This work included a new approach that introduced structural constraints, thus ensuring designs that would be more efficient at run-time. With his teammates, he then created an experimental test-bed for evaluating team-behavior specifications in complex and dynamic virtual worlds. In another project, Thuc single-handedly developed a simulator and optimizer for difficult logistics optimization problems. He continued to work on the core optimizer, combining a constraint-based method followed by multi-phase simulated annealing in the convex-hull of constraints to minimize costs and maximize a satisfaction function.

Thuc is also currently working on a method of automatically generating C code from specifications of agent behavior. He was the first author and presenter of a paper at AAMAS-2003, co-author of a paper at the Third ACG Workshop in 2003, and is the principal author of a paper that he and his research advisor plan to submit to AAMAS-2004. A senior faculty member describes Thuc as "simply off the scale, far off the scale."

Thuc maintains a 4.0 average in his course work, majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics. He was selected for the Dean's List from 2001 to 2003, and was recently initiated into the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He has been a tutor for many students in several classes, including a challenging Discrete Math class for CS majors; he is also the founder and co-president of the Vietnamese Student Association at CMU. He has been a summer intern at VT Tech Company, eMed Technologies, and Bosch Research Technology Center. Thuc won the 2001 USACO International Spring Contest in Programming and the 2001 USACO American National Olympiad in Programming, and was named to the 2001 All-American Programming Team.

Inventor of the first personal computer is a Vietnamese from France.


Technology: The versatile French man who introduced first microcomputer in 1972

-Stephanie Rouget, France

Many people, including the prestigious Computer Museum in Boston, consider Andre’ Truong Trong Thi as the father of microcomputers. Quite unexpectedly, this precursor is French and , together with his colleague Francois Gernelle, he built the Micral in 1972. It was the first complete microcomputer.


Today, there is nothing extraordinary about owning a personal computer taking up no more space than a small television set. Yet the power of microcomputers today is so great that, just a few years ago, it would have taken a whole room to contain them.

Information technology is continually progressing. In spite of ever bigger memories and increasingly efficient processors, computers have still not reached the limits of their development. There is a great future ahead of them. Andre’ Truong Trong Thi, today aged 63, certainly forsaw how successful they would be when, in the early 70s, he put the first complete microcomputer, the Micral R2E, on the market. It consisted of a box the size of a screen and did not have a keyboard or a screen. It worked using perforated tape and numerous switches placed on the front of the box.

Andre Trong had the idea for making something small on a trip to the United States in 1965. For this electronic enthusiast, it was a real eye-opener. He discovered very powerful electric circuits that were far smaller than in France. He immediately sawthe technologivcal and economic stakes of what he had just discovered and , at the beginning of 1970, with a few close collaborators, he set up R2E, a compny for building digital automata.

The birth of MICRAL, the first microcomputer:

The invention was triggered off by the French National Agronomic Research Institute (INRA). In 1972, the Institute placed an order with R2E. The agricultural researchers wanted to use a transportable computer system. Andre Truong then acquired a new microprocessor, the 8008, invented by Intel, and set the whole team of R2E to work on the project. Francois Genrelle joined them at that moment. It took five months of intensive team work to develop the first microcomputer. The sales price at the time was 8,500 French francs, which is far more than the cost of a computer today. R2E sold nearly 500 micrals. Then the United States turned to France. News of the Micral quickly spread to the USA where it caused a sensation. This invention led to the creation of a host of small firms.

It was not as successful in France. Financial difficulties prevented R2E from surviving this adventure. In 1978, Andre Truong’s company merged with Bull. Yet Andre Truong kept going on . Four years later, he developed the first compatible computer. But all computer manufacturers at the time, rejected compatibility, which is in fashion today. Andre Truong resigned and became a computer consultant for firms. These failures and this impression of not being understood by his peers did not hamper Truong’s perseverance. His desire to undertake new things was ever present. In 1988, he was back in the information technology spotlight with his new company APCT and AbsolutBoot, a CD-ROM able to make the Windows NT operating system work on any machine. The concept of compatibility is more present than ever.

Today, Andre Truong does not only expect financial success. His dearest wish is to be acknowledged by his country for his contribution to the word of micro computing. At a time when we are constantly reminded that France is dragging her feet in the race for new technologies, it is nice to know that one of the pioneers of the digital world is French.

Woa! How do you guys know so much about these briliant Vietnamese scientists? Man, where have I been all these times?

Wow i didnt know about this. good info!

New Director Is a Familiar Face at NASA

Eugene Trinh may be a familiar face, but as a former principal investigator and payload specialist, he brings a new perspective to the job of director of the Microgravity Research Division.
Eugene Trinh stepped into the post of director of the Microgravity Research Division already a seasoned veteran with 20 years' experience as a principal investigator in the Microgravity Research Program (MRP). Of his ability to take on this new role as director, Arnauld Nicogossian, associate administrator of the Office of Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications at NASA headquarters and head of the selection committee that chose Trinh for the post, says, "Trinh is well-respected as a scientist, an administrator, and as a payload specialist. His contributions to the program will be outstanding, and he has been strongly endorsed by the science community."

That endorsement is based on Trinh's varied and productive career at NASA since his initial work with the agency in 1979. After completing a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering at Columbia University and a doctorate in applied physics and engineering at Yale University, Trinh worked at Yale with Professor Robert Apfel, who would also become a NASA investigator, on an acoustic levitation technique that they applied to the natural properties of liquids in order to observe diverse fluid dynamics phenomena. "That technique turned out to be very useful to a researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at that time," notes Trinh. The researcher, Taylor Wang, wanted to use acoustic levitation to look at drop dynamics research in space. In 1979, Trinh was hired to do ground-based experiments with drop dynamics, implementing this technique. Working with Wang was Trinh's first contact with NASA.

Wang's experiment was scheduled for flight on the Spacelab–3 mission in April 1985. Wang was accepted as the payload specialist for that flight, with Trinh designated as the alternate. Though Trinh was not called on to fly on that mission, he was kept very busy with the ground team. "The hardware that was built for that experiment did not really function very well the first day," Trinh recalls. "We spent some long days and nights at Johnson Space Center figuring out the procedures for fixing the hardware." Working on the ground, Trinh helped to develop the procedures to fix the hardware in flight, which allowed Wang to collect data for the remaining portion of the mission.

That mission turned out to be the last for Trinh for a while due to the Challenger accident in 1986, which led to a hiatus for flights on the space shuttle. "So we concentrated on ground-based research," notes Trinh, which was based on containerless processing technology using the acoustic levitation technique. "At that time, containerless research was a kind of cross-cutting research in different disciplines in microgravity science. It included fluid dynamics work and also materials science research." Trinh and his group were asked to design a flight experiment facility for containerless experiments, which led to the development of the Drop Physics Module. The module was manifested on the first United States Microgravity Laboratory (USML–1) mission in June 1992.

As project scientist for the facility, Trinh was intimately involved in its design, making him the ideal candidate to operate the facility on orbit. Trinh was named payload specialist for the flight on USML–1, during which the facility supported the work of three investigators. For Trinh, this was a whole new adventure and very different from his experience conducting science in a traditional laboratory on the ground. "Although the science that we do on the ground and in space is supposedly the same, the techniques that we can use on the ground are totally different," he explains. For this set of experiments, which were designed to observe the behavior of free drops in the presence of sound waves in microgravity, it was nearly impossible to predict the effects of microgravity. "We had to be very responsive and very creative in our response to what happened on orbit," he explains. "We learned that for these experiments, it would be foolish to actually automate them altogether. Fortunately, we had an alternate way of carrying out the experiment, which was to operate it manually. That's what we did, and that's what really saved the day. We actually adapted to the environment and then used manually operated functions to carry out all the investigations."

Adaptation has been the key to much of Trinh's success at NASA. While Trinh focused on the USML–1 mission, things in the MRP were changing. The program's body of research was reorganized along first four, and then five, distinct disciplines (biotechnology, combustion science, fluid physics, and materials science first, with the later addition of fundamental physics). The NASA Research Announcement procedure was also implemented to solicit research proposals from the broad scientific community. Though Trinh had been accustomed to a multidisciplinary approach in his research, he responded by applying for funding in all four of the disciplines. "I was lucky enough to get proposals funded in four different disciplines," says Trinh. "I attribute that to the approach that we had. The approach was cross-cutting -- the type of technology that would address different problems in different disciplines using the same technique." This experience in adapting his work to a variety of different problems would influence much of Trinh's thinking on the future of research in the microgravity program.


Trinh observes the behavior of drops in the Drop Physics Module (DPM) during its second flight on the shuttle. The technique of acoustic levitation used in the DPM has been applied to several microgravity science areas, leading Trinh to develop a multidisciplinary view of the program.




A New Vision for a New Era
After two decades as a researcher, Trinh is ready to put what he's learned to use in meeting some new challenges. Speaking of his decision to apply for the directorship, Trinh says, "I thought the scientific challenges of the microgravity program were really compelling. I wanted to have a greater view of the program, which I kind of had a foretaste of, being involved in all those different disciplines." What struck Trinh was how different his approach to research was from the majority of the people around him. "I saw that there weren't too many people who were doing the same thing I was doing," he explains. "I was perceiving a kind of isolation in each of the disciplines in microgravity. In order to get optimum implementation on the space station, there is a need to tie all of the various disciplines together. I thought that this was a good opportunity for me to actually go and preach that."

With input from investigators and managers in each of the disciplines, Trinh is focusing on developing a plan for the future of microgravity research that defines the program's parameters and goals. "I think that what's happening these days is that we've been so concentrated on building the station that we haven't really put together a long-range plan for what is happening with our facilities and our science. We've been building a very good body of research and a lot of good researchers in the program, but we haven't really put out a plan for how we are going to continue doing that for the next 10 to 15 years, why we are going to do it, and why it is that we are best at doing it."

Once a plan is in place to define the direction of the program for the future, Trinh's next goal is to establish a set of facilities on the space station that function as a national resource on the order of the science station at the South Pole. "These facilities would allow you to get a set of measurements and experiments that cannot be obtained on the ground," he explains. "You would go there because there's nowhere else in the world where you can get those results." Preparing the program to provide those kinds of results in the future is just the type of challenge that Trinh is looking for. "I decided that this is really a great opportunity, with the space station coming up," notes Trinh, "an opportunity that I could not miss."

Holy bazooky! Too much to read. Did you type this all out? Or did you get it from somewhere else?

Slow down, I am still reading the second post.

Hey Dai Viet! Actually I pasted from my database. I've been collecting information on these successful individuals as a hobby. I was going to write a thesis on the contributions to science made by scientists of vietnamese origin, but then my mom told me to go get a job. So I'm trying to provide as much info. to any Viet who's interested in writing a paper about the role vietnamese play in science. I have many many more to share.

Keep them coming Kevin, I am very proud to be a Vietnamese because of the people above. You have done a great job, it really opened my eyes about the Vietnamese determinatnions. Only one word to describe: WOW! Thanks Kevin.

Here the results of the International Mathematical Olympia which is a mathemtics competition between countries of highschool students who want to compete.

http://imo.math.ca/results/99/rank.html

Vietnam achieved 2nd place after China and Russia who tied.



And the 2003 competition Vietnam was in 4th place.

http://imo.math.ca/results/03/rank.html

1.Bulgaria
2.China
3.U.S.A
4.Vietnam
5.Russia.

Oh well that's not bad considering Vietnam is a really poor country that has been ravaged by decades of war and trade embargos where kids have to worry about working rather than going to school.

Whoa, cool Byron, I've heard that Vietnam did well in the competition and tried to look for the rankings but couldn't find it, thanks! I think there's other competition that Vietnamese students compete with other South eastern countries and from college level to high school to younger grades, we got the highest ranking in all three levels.

Go VIETNAM! I love you!

Considering the Vietnamese population of 1.2 millions and have been in the U.S for less than 30 years, that's quite an accomplishment.

Are you talking about the Math olympics? I don't think the Vietnamese who ranked high in the contest were Vietnamese Americans. I think they were Vietnamese in Vietnam. since it is an International Mathematical Olympics.

I think that he's talking about the people that were mentioned above, not the winners of the Math Olympia. But those guys are hardcore in math.

Interesting Kevin. It's just shows what Vietnamese are capable of when given freedom of thoughts and opportunity. If the Vietnamese govt just reforms perhaps we'll have more scientists coming from Vietnam.

How come you guys haven't posted up any sucessful vietnamese in science.

I would have posted more if I knew anyone, but since I don't know anyone, then I am just relying on your sources. Thanks.

Here are a few more:

Dr. Long V. Nguyen, CEO of Pragmatics, Inc., gives $200,000 to George Mason University to establish endowments.

A $200,000 gift to the School of Law from Dr. Long Nguyen will create the Dr. Lawrence Cranberg Scholarship Endowment in Science and the Law and the Dr. Lawrence Cranberg Faculty Research Endowment in Science and the Law. Dr. Nguyen is a member of the university's Board of Visitors and President and CEO of Pragmatics, Inc., which is based in McLean, Virginia.

"We are very grateful to Dr. Nguyen for making this gift to honor Dr. Cranberg, his former physics professor and academic advisor at the University of Virginia," says School of Law Dean Mark Grady. "Although we are the fastest rising law school in the country, we are still a young law school and possess a young law school's endowment. These gifts will grow with us and will become a substantial part of our academic program."

The gift from Nguyen will endow a fund for scholarships for law students who hold a Ph.D. in a science and fellowships for law faculty members whose research intersects the fields of law and science.

Pragmatics’ Founder/Chairman/CEO, Dr. Long Nguyen, was recognized again as one of America's Top 100 Asian American Entrepreneurs by GoldSea, the Asian American Supersite. Eight factors were used in the evaluation: annual revenues, profitability, percentage of equity owned, number of employees, market valuation, impact on the industry, revenue growth, and prospects for future success. He was ranked #83 out of 80,000 Asian entrepreneurs actively conducting business in the United States. Other entrepreneurs on the list include the CEOs of Computer Associates, Yahoo, and Sybase. Dr. Nguyen believes this award is really a testament to the high quality of the entire Pragmatics organization. He would like to thank all of the talented and hard working Pragmatics staff for their contribution in earning Pragmatics national recognition. More information is at the GoldSea website at www.goldsea.com.

Doctor Dinh Duc Huu - ATI-VN’s President and the heart for the homeland


Over recent years, Vietnamese public media has always mentioned a noble man just returning home from the US, the man who invests energetically in many economic fields, and bravely encounters challenges emerging from Vietnamese new economic mechanism. He is Dinh Duc Huu – a smart and confident scientist, and a talented resourceful businessman.

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Over recent years, Vietnamese public media has always mentioned a noble man just returning home from the US, the man who invests energetically in many economic fields, and bravely encounters challenges emerging from Vietnamese new economic mechanism. He is Dinh Duc Huu – a smart and confident scientist, and a talented resourceful businessman. When being asked about why and how he chose and managed to complete so many complex tasks simultaneously, Mr. DInh answered confidently: “I am a Vietnamese and I want to prove the saying: Vietnamese can do all”

His ancestor lived in Giao Thuy, Nam Dinh, then moved to the south to Kien Giang in hope for a better life. A child of farmers, and without favourable conditions for study, he owned a smarter mind than many other children of wealthier families. In 1969, his father decided to sell fields and land to save money for Huu’s study in SaiGon. Not only indulging himself in study, Huu was also never absent in Saigon youth’s demonstrations. He was one of the representatives of the University’s Student Union.

In 1974, he went to study abroad in the US. He had to work to have money for accomodation and tuition fee, and study hard in hope for a good job. ”. In 1979, Huu graduated from New Orleans University in Lousiana state. In 1981, he finished master course in thermodynamics in Tulane University. In 1986, he won SRO- Doctorate Nuclear Engineering Degree, granted by US Agency of Energy . He was one of the first Asians to be appointed to director of a US nuclear power plant. In 1990, Dinh Duc Huu had a sudden decision which took aback all relatives and friends. Resigning from the position as a director, he took to business and established high-tech ATI-US company. Ten years later, he became a successful businessman in the US, owning a number of environmental technology patents. ATI - US company, headed by Huu, was considered to be among the top successful ethnic businesses welcomed to the White House by Bill Clinton, the US President.

Being on the top of fame and fortune, inspired by the inner love for the homeland, he returned. In 1994, Huu first time came back home. In Oct., 1997, both Mr. Dinh and his wife set up a business in their motherland, named American Technologies, Inc.- Vietnam (ATI-VN) with headquarter in Ho Chi Minh City and an office in Hanoi.

He was present himself in all parts of the S-shaped country, and had chance of being hosted and having direct talks with leaders of all levels, as well as with Vietnam businessmen, which helped him with final business decisions.

Dinh Duc Huu is the first Vietnamese businessman to explore oil& gas. On February 28, 2000, ATI signed a big Product Sharing Contract with PETROVIETNAM over Blocks 102 & 106 offshore Gulf Tonkin, in an area of 14.000km2 70 miles south east of Hai Phong.

The second area of his investment is eco-tourism. ATI has set up many eco-tourism centers in north Vietnam: Sapa, Thai Binh, Hai Phong, Nam Dinh, Quang Ninh. Eco tours are combined with entertainment activities for the purpose of raising public health. ATI also constantly provides information and serivces on trans-Viet tours and Western tours. Thac Da- Ba Vi project, which has already been in service since quarter II, 2001 and has brought about profits, is the first of ATI’s tourism attracting locations.

Beside tourism acitivities, ATI has also invested in a promising but risky area: aquatic farming. ATI-Vietnam tries to set up special zones to deploy technology transfer and environmental treatment, to improve shrimp farming productivity, to prevent and treat shrimp diseases. ATI will also offer supply for processing factories built within the region for the purpose of local consumption and export. Currently, ATI-VN has successfully conducted fishery projects in most of northern Vietnam coastline provinces: Nam Dinh, Thai Binh, Hai Phong, Quang Ninh with capital up to hundreds of VND billion. Soon Dinh Duc Huu will expand his activities to the central Vietnam.

ATI’s models have become places to exchange experience and technologies on shrimp culture. Particularly, there are white shrimp farm of 700ha in Hoanh Bo, Quang Ninh and shrimp breeding center in Hai Hau, Nam Dinh. On August 6, 2002, the biggest ever fishery project in north Vietnam was launched in Tien Lang, Hai Phong, in which shrimps and other aquatic species will be raised over the area of 846 ha. Afforestation and environmental care are also included in the project.

Another important field of operation of ATI is E-commerce. Long before ATI has launched a large online trade link called BVOM.com, a way of doing business via Internet.

With over 10 years of experience and prestige in the fierce US market, ATI is now an expert in import-export business providing valuable assistance to anyone looking for international partners. Many business tours to the US have been organized by ATI within 4 years of operation in Vietnam.

Up to now, ATI-VN has had branches in almost all northern provinces with staff amounting to 1000.

Not limiting himself in his business, together with his wife - Mrs. Nancy Pham, Mr. Dinh enthusiastically attends and sponsores poor patients and people in such programs as “for children’s smile”, schooling encouraging, sports, and “repay favour” for veterant’s families. When asked about their experience in charity work, they just said simply: “The only thing I desire is that Vietnamese children will not have to wander for a shelter at night”.

In fact, Mr. Dinh Duc Huu has reason to be proud of what he and his staff have done over the years. We wish that his dreams will come true in a near future - a future when ATI with its great successes proudly shoulders with other leading companies in the world, proving the belief of Huu :” Vietnamese can do all”. Perhaps, it is that belief that encourages him in the hard competition in business

Can anyone confirm that Bill Nguyen is Vietnamese?


Bill Nguyen
Founder & President




Bill Nguyen drives product vision and strategic business direction at SEVEN. He works with SEVEN's mobile operator customers and technology partners to define best-in-class solutions for delivering wireless data strategies.

In less than three years under Nguyen's leadership, SEVEN has achieved successful commercial deployments with the world's largest mobile operators, and received multiple market awards of distinction, including Network Magazine's 2003 Product of the Year and Frost & Sullivan's 2002 Mobile Communications Entrepreneurial Company of the Year.

Nguyen has played a critical role in the successes of six startups, two of which he founded. At Onebox, Nguyen and his team redefined the unified-messaging market. Onebox was eventually acquired by Phone.com, now Openwave Systems. Prior to starting Onebox, Nguyen joined the founders of Tioga Systems (now Support.com) as vice president of products. He contributed to the product definition of what became the leading support infrastructure software for corporate enterprises and service providers. Nguyen has served as vice president of products for push technology pioneer FreeLoader, and headed business development and product management at the ForeFront Group. At ForeFront, Nguyen was responsible for launching ForeFront's Web utilities, including WebWhacker, the first offline browser.

Nguyen has been named to Fortune's 40 Under 40 list, MIT's Technology Review 100, and Red Herring's Top 10 Entrepreneurs, as the lead entrepreneur. He belongs to the World Economic Forum's Global Leaders of Tomorrow, and the CTIA Wireless Internet Caucus Leadership Council.

Trung Dung


Trung Dung
Founder, President & CEO, Tascola Inc.; Founder, CTO, CSO, OnDisplay Inc.


Trung Dung is the Founder, President & CEO of Tascola, Inc., a venture-backed company developing collaborative supply chain software. Previously, Trung was the Founder, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Strategy Officer of OnDisplay, Inc, a pioneering developer of Business-to-Business infrastructure products. OnDisplay was founded in 1996, went public in 1999 as one of the 10 most successful IPOs of the year on NASDAQ, and was acquired by Vignette Corp. in 2000 for $1.8 billion. Prior to OnDisplay, Trung was an early technical member at Open Market, the first developer of Internet commerce software. Mr. Dung left Vietnam at age 17 and is an icon of success in the Vietnamese Bay Area community.

One word to describe these successfull Vietnamese: WOW!